1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the identification and categorization of customer's goals when contacting a customer service center. In particular the present invention relates to the field of integrating customer behavioral models with the handling of customer requests.
2. Description of Background Information
The common knowledge and practice in the industry is to allow customers to map their goal to an organizational unit and, thus, determine which service center would best handle their goal. The customer typically does this with center information provided from the telephone directory or the bill. For example, some of the center information provided in the telephone directory include “to order or move your home telephone service”, “for questions about your bill”, and “residence repair”. After the customer has contacted the center they believe is most appropriate to accomplish their goal, the customer typically has to use an IVR (Interactive Voice Response) system or a similar system to accomplish his/her intended goal. Based on the choice of the intended goal, a system is used to direct the customer to the appropriate center. The customer and the agent determine if the customer's goal can be appropriately handled at that center or if the customer needs to be transferred to another, more appropriate location.
Currently, customers use the telephone to present their goals. When the customer makes a call, some call centers may split off incoming customer calls to a dedicated agent group when the customer has a specific language preference. Some call centers also split off customer calls that originate from residences separate from customer calls that originate from businesses. In addition, some call centers split customer calls where the customer wishes to place an order for a service separate from the customer calls where the customer wishes additional information on their bill or similar information.
Whether a call center performs any preliminary routing or not, none of the call centers route customer calls to agents with a conditional probability. They also do not categorize the customers' behaviors and model those categorized behaviors. In addition, many service centers now handle customer requests through the telephone, while future technology will allow customers to accomplish their goals through a variety of channels beyond the telephone.
The ideal customer handling system is designed with full and complete knowledge of functionality, technology, and customer requirements. While functionality and technology issues are represented well, a full, rich understanding of the customers and their goal statements are not well understood. In fact, the common assumption is that the customer's comments are similarly stated and, thus, a single view of the customer population can be taken. This single view approach limits the performance of an implemented customer service system because not all of the customer comments are similarly stated, and thus handled appropriately. Therefore, the implemented system may function well for certain customers, while being inappropriate for other customers. When overall performance is critical, these mishandled customer contacts can cost organizations time and money.
An improved approach to this situation is to not take a single view of the customers, but rather to examine the customers' comments and the verbal styles in which the comments are presented. The comments represent the goal of the customer and can be attained through a predicate analysis.